In the early 90's, the rapid growth of mobile computing drove the development of smaller, lighter, and more portable tools for information processing, particularly for storing data. One of these innovations was removable containers having magnetically stored media thereon, such as the Personal Computer memory Card (PC Card) technology. The power and versatility of PC Cards to store digital audio data made them standard equipment in mobile electronic devices, such as digital cameras and digital audio players.
Digital audio files are stored in a variety of formats using different audio encoding algorithms that are used to digitally encode and compress music into encoded audio formats at near Compact Disk (CD) quality. Such encoded audio formats include WINDOWS Media Audio (WMA), Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) Layer 3 (MP3), and other encoded audio formats. Encoded audio files can be easily transmitted over the Internet and stored in the memory area of a PC Card for future playback. Each MP3 encoded audio file stored on a PC Card contains both audio data and additional data. The additional data identifies and categorizes each file that is stored in the memory of the PC Card. For instance, the additional data can include the title of a song encoded in a digital audio file, the name of the artist of song, the album of the song, the year of the song, a comment regarding the song, and the genre of the song (e.g., blues, classic rock, country, hip-hop, and the like.
Some printers have the capability of reading the memory of a PC Card that was used by a digital camera, or other electronic device, to store digital photography files, digital video files, or digital audio files. With the PC Card input to such a printer, a personal computer is not needed to get a print out of the digital photographs stored in the memory of the PC Card. When one such printer acts as a stand alone device, not in communication with a personal computer or other computing device, the printer lacks a user interface to accept commands for demand printing of the information corresponding to the audio data on the digital audio file, such as any additional information that is stored for each digitally encoded audio file. This is problematic in that, to find out what has been stored on the PC Card, a user must establish communications with a computing device and then use the associated user interface in order to request a print out of a brief table of contents or a short listing of the inventory of files in the memory of the PC Card in order. The subject matter described herein addresses this and other problems with obtaining a printed version of this additional information.